Shellcrackers ?

[stormchaser]

Hey was wondering if anyone could help me out with some shellcracker information. My stepdad and I are planning on going to the diversion canal on saturday and was wanting to know if they are biting there and if so what are some good locations or types of structure to fish. If nothing is really biting there we can put in Lake Marion and fish there. We just really would love to get into some good shellcrackers and wanted to know of any good reports. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jay]

Hill's Landing told me they didn't have any reports of good catches in the canal when I talked to them Tuesday, but that was obviously before the full moon. I have, however, been hearing very good reports on Lake Marion. Tell us how you fare!

[stormchaser]

Jay, I really appreciate it. If you don't mind me asking you wouldn't happen to know which areas on Marion are producing do you? I will give you guys a report on our fishing and locations if we have any luck.

[Jay]

I didn't hear much detail, but I think they were catching them out of Pack's Landing. Good luck!

[stormchaser]

Jay I really appreciate that. I actually ended up going to Lake Wateree last weekend and caught a good bit of cats in shallow water. I am actually going to Marion tomorrow and try near Pack's Landing. I will give a full report this weekend on how the shellcrackers are doing. I heard reports of them being shallow in 2-4 feet of water. I hope this is the case bc I am really itching to get into those biguns.

[Jay]

Yeah, that sounds great. Good luck!

[stormchaser]

Started the day at Low Falls Landing, fished the cypress area near railroad bridge across from Pack's Landing. We thought we were going to have a great day of shellcrackers bc the first two of the day were two nice ones. Really didn't catch many more after that. We fished further back into the cypress and it was some nice looking fishing back in there. We caught more bluegills the further back we went into the woods. We fished in 4-5 ft of water and we caught around 30-40 fish but most were small with only 9 keepers. Spoke with some other boaters and they said the shellcracker bite was better last weekend. Imagine that, we should have fished Marion besides Wateree after all. It seemed like the closer to the open lake we were (100 yards) the more shells we caught and the further back into the cypress the more bluegill we caught. We stopped moving back into the cypress when we started seeing Gar topping the water. All in all it was an ok day, but man were there some boats on the water with the poker run. There were at least 200 boat trailers at low falls.